A modest proposition:
Great Britain has gone mad. Or at least is exhibiting the first signs of a
truly advanced schizophrenia.

If the eyes are the
windows of the soul, the windows of a nation are its movies. The glass is
cleaned to a transparent sparkle by the collective self-expression of a dozen
or a hundred different people all doing their own things, and by the mandates
of the public, who want to see clear through the artist's vision (the hell
with him) into the world they live in. Almost too easily, Britain's
schizophrenia can be glimpsed through the perfect transparency of its cin­ema.
To many wishful Britishers the bifur­cation of
movie culture must seem exhila­rating: on my right the Gandhis,Chariots
of Fires,and Passages to India;on my left the Private
Functions, Ploughman's
Lunches,and Wetherbys.
But it can also be heard as a tattoo of terror beating out a warning to
the world.

It's a symptom of
schizophrenia that the patient can be completely lucid in each of his
separate personalities, exhibiting no theatrical madness whatever. He or she
does not romp about the drawing-room in a flowing nightgown like Ophelia or
Lucia di Lammermoor. No, there is about
incipient insanity a deadly earnestness. The pin­striped suit or the
Marxist-Leninist denims house a fissuring ego as fitly as does the shredded
robe, the tattered doublet. What Britain is suffering from, however, is a
very peculiar and complex form of divided self. It often believes it is one
personality when it is in fact two, and that it is two nations when it is in
fact one.

Through its history,
Britain has devel­oped a form of romantic schism, called the class system,
which allows one half of the country always to blame the other for what is
going wrong. Since the Empire slipped away, Britain can cope with the
depression, the shame, the anger only by directing it at someone else. And
when xenophobia doesn't do the trick, the nation splits itself in half and
becomes a two-in-one limited company for
mutual
reproach. The middle class blames the working class for every­thing, and the
working class blames the middle class for everything. Then they both turn
around and blame the upper class, which scarcely exists except as a media
figment. (There are only six left.)

This is, of course,
exactly the way in which a human being turns to schizophre­nia. He decides,
unconsciously, to hold one part of himself responsible for the other part's
misery. The wonder of British cinema in the last ten years is that this split
person­ality manifests itself not only macrocosmi­cally – in two kinds of
filmmaking, the Oscar-lauded chunks of history (Gandhi, Chariots)and the
shoestring-Socialist pics (Ascendancy,Wetherby) – butmicrocosmi­cally.
There is schism within individual films as well as within the collective mass.

●

The two Oscar
blockbusters have been picked at enough by critics to obviate detailed
surgery here. So has the whole India phenomenon embracing Gandhi, A Passage to India, The Far
Pavilions, The Jewel in the Crown,and two more
forth­coming miniseries, Mountbatten and Indira Gandhi. All we need do is pick about to find the
special signs we need of British split-personality.

What we find are the
inner sores of self-laceration and ghastly internal bleeding. Far from being
celebrations of Empire, except visually, these films are severe reproaches to
British history. While our ears and eyes swoon to the éclat of majestic
scenery, lovely costumes, and gosh all those ele­phants, our souls are being
told to stay behind after class and get a ticking off for treating our
colonial subjects so badly. For carving up other nations and leaving them to
put the pieces together. For snobbery, cruelty, and oppression.

Here is
double-standard moviemaking in its most ambitious and appalling form – it's
like being asked to bend over a luxurious perfumed ottoman while being given
six of the best with teacher's cane. There's a love-hate relationship with
Empire in British cinema that is totally unresolved. Intellec­tually, we
agree to eat humble pie about our imperial past. Emotionally, the impact of
the India movies is to make us fall head over heels in love with the dear
dead old days, when even Britain's villainies were Big; when even its
blunders and failures had tragic status; and when, if we had nothing else, goddammit, at least we had glamour.

It's probably true:
you cannot make films on a big gilded scale, like Gandhi and A
Passage to India,and
expect audiences to condemn the characters at their center. Do you want to
pick a fight with someone 100 times your size? How do you stand outside a
historical event that has got you wrapped around in glorious 70 mm. or
the ampli­tudes of wide screen and Technicolor?

Gandhi, A Passage to India,and Chari­ots of
Fire (where the eternal light of India is swapped for the eternal torch of
the Olym­pics) show Britain, even when going down, as going down in a blaze
of glory. Even the roles of the non-Anglo-Saxon purveyors of infinite wisdom
– the Mahatma, Professor Godbole – are taken by
British actors; Ben Kingsley and Alec Guinness
plaster boot polish over their faces until they are as one with the
Subcontinent. And even the roles of the disgraceful British snobs and nitwits
and despots who made us make such a mess in India are played redemptively by Great British Actors: Sir John Mills, Sir
John Gielgud, Sir Ralph Richardson, Sir... zzzzz. In these big-screen Oscar hunters, we just cant
help loving ourselves.

●

Enter the still, small
voice of flagellating conscience: a breed of British low-budget movie, TV
funded or drawing on ex-TV talent, in which we cannot stop hating our­selves.
Television, that small flickering thing in the corner of the sitting room
where there used to be a fire, is a great medium for honing the contemptuous
eye – and for winning respect abroad based, perversely, on its incommunicable
cultural selfhood. Remembrance,
Ascen­dancy,Wetherby,and
Another Time, Another Place have all copped prizes at foreign
festivals. Partly this is because for­eign audiences cannot understand them
but are convinced they are subversive; partly because the lack of imaginative
vital­ity or visual flair in most of them looks like the last word in Brechtian or
Rossellinian austerity.

Let us not doubt the
intelligence of these films. They take a jeweler's eyeglass to this diamond
set in a silver sea, this England, and are determined to spot the flaws. Only
then, perhaps, can the diamond be refaced and perfected, even if in the
process it is cut smaller and smaller. Against the besot­ted giantism of the Gandhi-Passage-Char­iots axis,
here
is an evangelical, a redemp­tive Lilliputianism.

Yes, but how does it
work in practice? These films take a teensy corner of British life past or
present and describe it with the kind of social minuteness and Socialist sub­texture that make left-wing critics go all gooey.
Symbolism is used occasionally, with an unapologetic, even derisive bold­ness,
as if the artist were really above such things but here he goes anyway. In
Edward Bennett's Ascendancy,Connie (Julie Cov­ington), a mournful young Englishwoman living in
Northern Ireland as partition is about to break out, has a crippled right
arm. This makes playing the piano very difficult for her, but symbol-spotting
very easy for the audience. Ah Connie, your
Capitalist (right) power to move events (arm) is hero­ically impotent! It is
the left that has the muscle, etc., etc. Not even that very
noticeably, however, as she glooms about the house in eternal mourning for
Ireland and for her brother's recent death in World War I.

Here in its purest
form is the pintsize modern British hate-movie. The main character is
helpless against the tide of his­tory, whether it's Ypres
or Belfast. Social events are always a conspiracy by Them (rich and powerful)
against Us (poor and helpless). And the hero(ine)'s
defense strat­egy is not an eloquent attempt to change minds or events by
words or deeds but a self-hugging, holier-than-thou alienation. Its weapons are irony,
pain, and a narcissis­tic sense of tragic hurt.

The Ploughman's Lunch,written by Ian McEwan and
directed by Richard Eyre, exhibits these qualities no less surely than Ascendancy.
Though it's about a disaf­fected journalist who is having a crise de plume after the Falklands War, the roots of our
hero's disaffection are as plurally vague as the
reasons for Connie's crippled arm. This Grub Street Hamlet (played by a Jona­than
Pryce sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought)
becomes a blank page on which we the audience may write all our disaffec­tions.
So we sit out there feeling vaguely disaffected for 100 minutes, wondering
what to write, until teacher comes in at the end and says we can all write:
'Margaret Thatcher, the Conservative
Party, and the Horrible Swing to the Right' The picture's finale unspools at a Brighton Conservative Party conference –
filmed for real, with the fictional characters mingling with the fac­tual
crowd – where Maggie is holding forth in a stream of what the movie would
like us to see as right-wing bellicosity

This film and its
suspect schema, which makes you feel you're thinking for yourself when you're
actually waiting for a prompt from the movie, were hailed by many Brit­ish
critics as a great insight into the British Zeitgeist. But its smugly acerbic
self-regard is not so much a mirror held up to Britain as a mirror held up to
itself. And a pocket mirror at that. The film is born of TV and TV styles.
The camera is seldom more than an unadventurous recorder of talking heads;
the movie medium plays almost no creative role in using angle, lighting, or
design to add strong expressive or expres­sionist inflections.

The Ploughman's Lunch belongs to the same
school as more recent films like A Private Function, Dance with a Stranger,and
Wetherby. Here the
something-rotten-in-the-state-of-Britain syndrome is more cleverly voiced, in
scripts and stories, but equally underpowered cinematically. In these movies
we have a series of Austerity Britain: of food rationing (A Private Func­tion),emotion
rationing (Dance with a Stranger),and self-expression rationing (Wetherby).

The first two films
are set in postwar Britain, when the pinch of World War II self-sacrifice is
yielding to the returning appetites of peacetime; just as, in the Eighties,
recession-racked Britain is con­stantly peering at the skyline for better
times on the way. The pig in A Private Function is a potentially
glorious comic McGuffin: a present on a platter
from writer Alan Bennett to director Malcolm
Mowbray. But instead of preparing a ban­quet with it,
ex-TV Mowbray looks the gift pig in the mouth. What
could have been a luscious allegoric farce is shot in the visual and
behavioral earth tones of stingy, dingy naturalism. It's a suburban newsreel
instead of a sumptuous porky fable for our time.

Bennett's small-town
bigwigs (DenholmElliott
in
prime sleazy form) are determined to carve up this hunk of black-market
flesh; Maggie Smith and Michael Palin are the
social climbers who steal it; and the pig herself (Betty) farts all over the
parlor. This is a picture of Britain in the Forties for Britain in the Eighties,
when we're all going mad at the effects of the recession, the miners' strike,
the failing pound, etc., and yelling for our
long-overdue banquet with haunch of pig. But Mowbray
never turns the particular into the reverberan,
the
local into the epic. It's a small picture, full of vague emphases and
floating self-con­tempt, about a small Britain.

So is Dance with a Stranger,written by Shelagh Delaney and directed by Mike Newell. Attacking
another potentially momentous fable of postwar life – the story of Ruth Ellis, the
last woman to be hanged in Britain – Newell directs it like a tinny film noir. This
is a Britain, the film tries to argue, in the grip not of a Recession Era but
of its sexual and emotional correlative, a Repression Era. But for a film about
sexual­ity scorned or stifled, and its dire results – Ruth Ellis murdered
her lover when he left her – it has little eroticism and less passion. It is
merely a sequence of demure and doomy conversation
scenes in which Ellis (Miranda Richardson) bobs her
platinum hair at sugar daddy (Ian Holm)
and
errant knight errant (Rupert Everett) alike. The film makes no real
imaginative leap into the Fifties, nor is its vision big enough to set up any
resonance between Britain then and Britain now. It glooms from scene to scene
in its own timeless Neverneverland.

Wetherbyis the most
frustrating of all the current dirges for Britain, because there's wit here
fighting a losing battle with writer-director David Hare's formulary sense of
place and time. We are not in the immedi­ate postwar years here except for
the flash­back sequences, when we glimpse the girl­hood of our schoolmarm
heroine Vanessa Redgrave. But Hare's Yorkshire
village seems time-warped anyway. As the police investigation proceeds – a
young man has shot his brains out in Vanessa's kitchen, no one knows why, no
one knows even who he was – we're in a rural England that could be a cross
between Agatha Christie and Ealing
Comedy. It's one of those films in which, whenever someone comes up to a
cottage door and opens it, the reverse angle from inside the cottage seems to
look out on a couple of studio shrubs and a backcloth that's seen better
days.

Hare's background as a
stage writer betrays itself in a narrative rhythm whereby each caesura in the
story seems to be a pause while the scene changes and the characters lock
themselves into position for the next chunk of dialogue. The attempt to
crossbreed psychodrama with whodunit is promising: Redgrave's
soul is unpicked, and so is the soul of Britain, even as the police pick at
the mystery killing. But Hare, like the other directors in this British
mini-movie movement, has let message and medium infect each other. His themes
– inarticulacy and fear-of-pain – are em­bodied in an anal-retentive visual
style.

Camera movement is
confined mostly to token little track-forwards from introduc­tory
master-shots into conversational two-shots. Lighting is noirish,but drably and unstylishly so – more as if there were elec­tricity
problems in Redgrave's cottage than as if Caravaggio
or Jacques Tourneur had dropped by. Like A Private
Function and Dance with a Stranger,Wetherbyis fasci­nating as
a script and blueprint. But in performance the dread miniaturism
of TV influences cuts it down from being a British tragedy to being a teaser
trailer for one.

These movies are
undone by their failure to jack up a particular and parochial plot line into
a story with resonance and universality. They refuse to make the leap from TV
slice of life to high-density movie mythmaking. The schizophrenia afflicting
the Gandhi-Chariots school of movie was a split per­sonality between
anti-British content and a style that celebrated Britain. But in these
shoestring suffering-movies one finds a divided self in which desire – to
make the particular dramatize the general – totally fails to mesh with
achievement. The partic­ular remains the particular.

●

Given this
thinking-small climate among young British directors, it's no surprise that
when they do try to make the leap from Small to Great they break both legs
and several ribs in the process. Michael Radford
made
his feature debut with Another Time, Another Place,a competent little some­thing-rotten
pic about a Scottish POW camp for Italian
prisoners in World War II, where a lovelorn Lothario (Giovanni Mauriello) attempts to thaw the
deadly frost of Scots wife (Phyllis Logan).
Radford, eager to extend his vision of Big Chill
Britain, next made 1984,a
brave attempt to rise on the sprocket-holes of his dead self to higher
things.

He doesn't make the climb.
There are deliberate, forced attempts at cinematic grandeur: a bold Fritz Lang-style
painted roofscape outside a window, the recurring
image of the lush green hillside that haunts our hero's dreams. And the mass
rally scenes have a momentary verve as the heads bob multitudinously before
the lumi­nous face of Big Brother. But whenever we get on with the story, the
film goes dead. It becomes a succession of two-up dialogue scenes in which
your eyes, and eventually your ears, are crushed under the weight of all that
script. In the interrogation scenes, especially, you may feel that the screen
has been cleared of visual clutter for a logor­rheic
demonstration of Great British Act­ing. John Hurt vs. Richard
Burton, and the first man to underplay a phrase gets a ferret down his pants.

1984 gave way to 1985,
and 1984 gave way to Brazil. Now here's
a
different, mir­ror-written problem. At least in Terry Gil­liam –
American-born, though resident in Britain – we see an eye at work.
Gilliam has concocted an après-Orwell fantasy about a hyper-bureaucratic city
state, which might have been designed by Piranesi
and Albert Speer and lit by LyonelFeininger. But though it
has designers and decorators galore, this metropolis forgot to hire a
screenwriter. The plot is a duff succession of cod-paranoid revue skits, in
which our hero (Jonathan Pryce) is assailed by explod­ing piping in his flat,
bombs in restaurants, nasty civil servants in the corridors of power, and
(well, why not, we're throwing everything else in) an electronic Samurai who
pops up spoiling for a fight in an alley.

With Gilliam one
wishes to reverse the emphasis of Cezanne's quip about Monet – "Il
n'est qu'un oeil, mais Mon Dieu quel oeil" – and say, 'My
God what an eye, but he is only an eye' The problems of the British
cinema would be entirely solved if Gilliam (all eye and no script) could be
somehow persuaded to mate with the small-screen Savonarolas
(all script and no eye) like Hare, Eyre, and Mowbray.

●

Amid this grim torrent
of Brit movies about the Brits, which has the bizarre char­acteristic of
trying to flow upstream to its source rather than downstream, there are a few
brave souls determined to swim in the other direction and reach the open sea.

John Boorman's films are 'British' only in the best and least
limiting sense: in their unstrained, poetic incorporation of ideas from
Arthurian legend and ancient myth into diverse plots and settings. Indeed you
can argue that Point Blank,
Deliverance,and The Heretic are better films – for
the poetic transformations they inspire in embroidering these motifs into
stories with a different life and dramatic self-sufficiency of their own –
than the more frontal exposi­tions of Anglo-Saxon myth and morality in Zardozand Excalibur.

Likewise, the best
sequences in Boor­man's latest film, The Emerald
Forest,are those
where philosophy meets painting – or Jean Jacques
Rousseau
meets Henri Rousseau – amid the flying certainties of a
far-flung quest film. The carrying of the American engineer (Powers Bootle) from jungle to civilization is a brilliant
montage of traveling shots as his stretcher is cross-cut with a leopard
pounding through the trees; and there is a wonderful surrealism in the
scaling by the engineer's frond-girt wild child (Charley Boorman) of
the wall of a big-city apartment block. Elsewhere, the film misfires, as Boorman's misses and near-misses always do, when the
message is allowed to speak louder than the story or images. The message here
comprises much weary tub-thumping about the envi­ronment and the white man as
an invader who destroys a "magical" unity between tribal man and
Holy Nature. Boorman the eye and Boorman the
myth-spinning romantic are stronger than Boorman
the
moralist.

Ridley Scott, like Boorman, has
a mytho-centric British romanticism that provides
the textured, labyrinthine visuals in The Duellists, Alien,and Blade
Runner. The last two, though American in cast and con­text, have a
European density of image – sprung from painters like Blake, Fuseli, Redon – quite unlike that
of U.S. sci-fi movies. Blade Runner,especially, has a plot as clotted with medieval quest
impulses as any Boorman film, and a struc­ture
almost as disorienting in its place-time challenges as any Roeg. This
fall, Scott's Legend will leap into daylight, to show if he can
similarly transform the cuddly-monster variety of Tolkienite
fantasy.

Nicolas Roeg is the third major British filmmaker whose Britishness is not a ball-and-chain tying him to British
subjects and settings, but a spiritual and cultural taproot from which he can
grow into the open air of "international" subjects. His last four films – The Man Who Fell to
Earth, Bad Timing,
Eureka,and Insignificance – have all featured American characters or set­tings. What makes
him British is the Anglo-European eclecticism of reference, which he shares
with Boorman and Scott, to the legends and literature of
his own island and continent, and a love of fragmentation whereby the
kaleidoscope, not the window, becomes the view-through to truth. In its
jagged blend of near-absurdism and total
seriousness, this fragmentation is closer to Lawrence Sterne, Lewis Carroll, and Vir­ginia Woolf
than
to the more sinuous logic-of-illogic of Borges
and
Pirandello.

These are the
"international" U.K. filmmakers who, while being identifiably Brit­ish,
are unfettered to British content. And while they fight the good fight at the
multimillion end of the market, the pocket-size Brit-obsessives like Hare and Eyre find their visionary
adversaries in directors like Derek Jarman and Neil
Jordan.

Jordan's The
Company of Wolves is a snarling Freudian-Gothic opéra fantasti­que. Born in the diaphragm of the Euro­pean fairy
tale, the film has a pan-psychic resonance that reaches up and out to all
corners of the global unconscious. Jarman has mined
martyrdom myths in Sebastiane and repainted
Shakespeare with eclectic glitter in The Tempest. In his new,
non-narrative feature The Angelic Conversa­tions,shot in hallucinatory
video, Jarman uses Shakespeare's sonnets as a way
to make British culture leap out to join the imagery of Dante and
Michelangelo, Coc­teau and Kenneth Anger. Rock, fire,
and flaking water; singing air and twanging instruments; machismo in
meltdown; the bullying certainties of nationalism liquefied by an elemental
alchemy that unites mod­ern and medieval, the local and the limit­less.

All art is a
communication between the Self and the Other. The problem comes when the Self
appoints as the Other merely another part of the Self. Britain has the means
of escaping this psychological hall of mirrors, this endless self-communion,
by loosening its fixation on "British" subjects. It's no surprise
that a country that has lost its wealth and its political power, a country
seized with insecurity and ravaged by strikes, should take refuge in hugging
its past or dyspeptically trying to shake truths out of its present. It's a
way of keeping alive an endangered identity. But if cultural iden­tity has
any meaning at all, or any hope of staying alive, it must be able to walk,
talk, and function when not fastened to national­istic subjects.

In the cultural
boom-time of Elizabethan England, you recall, there was a bardic
operator called Shakespeare who wrote plays set in Denmark, Cyprus, Venice, Illy­ria, Florence, France, and Bermuda, as well as a few
in Britain. In an important sense, of course, the plays were all
"about" England. But they were not umbilically
tethered to England, or its history or politics, like Gan­dhi, Ascendancy or Chariots
of Fire.

The Eighties brand of
Little Englandism is a sure way to guarantee that
England stays little, and that English movies do the same. An expanded vision
is needed – the vision of Jarman and Jordan, of
Scott and Roeg and Boorman – that sees beyond the shores and beyond the
equally parochial­izing confines of telly aesthetics. Other­wise, the schizophrenic impulse
will grind films ever smaller, and a cinema that talks only to itself will be
in danger of devouring itself.